THIS newspaper was established in 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” One of the chief ways in which intelligence presses forward is through innovation, which is now recognised as one of the most important contributors to economic growth. Innovation, in turn, depends on the creative individuals who dream up new ideas, and then—often with great difficulty—turn them into reality.

The Economist recognises these talented people through our annual Innovation Awards, presented in five fields of technological endeavour: bioscience, computing, telecoms, energy and a special “no boundaries” category. This year's awards were presented at a ceremony in San Francisco on September 23rd. And the winners were:

• Bioscience: Raymond Damadian, president and chairman of FONAR. Dr Damadian first proposed the idea of using the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as an “external probe for the detection of internal cancer”. In 1970, he found that cancerous tissues could be distinguished from healthy tissues using NMR. He went on to build the first prototype for a whole-body magnetic-resonance scanner and produced the first image of a human chest on July 3rd 1977. Now in widespread use, magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) technology has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The question of who most deserves the credit for its invention, however, remains controversial (see article).

• Computing: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium. In 1989, Mr Berners-Lee proposed a scheme to enable electronic documents to link to other documents stored on other computers. This idea, which later grew into the world wide web, started out as a program called Enquire, which Mr Berners-Lee wrote for his own use while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He went on to write the first web browser and web server, both of which he gave away on the internet, along with details of the protocols to describe and transmit web pages. Today the web consists of billions of pages and is used by hundreds of millions of people.

• Telecoms: Paul Baran, co-founder, the Institute for the Future. In 1959, Dr Baran began to think about ways to make America's communications infrastructure resistant to a nuclear attack. He proposed using a system called “distributed adaptive message block switching”, known today as packet switching. This involves breaking digital information into small chunks, or packets, and sending them separately over the network, thus doing away with centralised switching centres and enabling the network to work even when partly destroyed. His idea was initially ignored and was only given its first proper test in 1969, when it was used as the basis for ARPANET, an experimental computer network that later grew into the internet.

• Energy: Geoffrey Ballard, chairman, General Hydrogen. In the late 1970s, Dr Ballard began research into fuel cells as a means of addressing the problem of smog in large cities. Fuel cells combine stored hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate electricity, water vapour and no harmful emissions. Modern fuel cells are expected to power a new breed of electric vehicles, by overcoming the cost, size and weight limitations of batteries. In 1979 Dr Ballard co-founded Ballard Power Systems to develop, commercialise and market fuel cells. The firm now has partnerships with companies including DaimlerChrysler and Ford, and has supplied fuel cells to Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Volkswagen.

• No Boundaries: Ronald Coase, professor emeritus of economics, University of Chicago Law School. In papers published in 1959 and 1960, Dr Coase asked why valuable radio spectrum was going to waste. He suggested that the problem was the lack of private property rights over spectrum, which prevented the formation of a market to allocate spectrum efficiently. The answer, he proposed, was to open the allocation of radio spectrum to market forces. His proposal was derided, but radio spectrum is now routinely allocated by auction, and his idea helped to create novel markets in other fields, such as tradeable emissions permits to limit pollution.